This will alleviate the RAM limitations that Revit has suffered from in recent years, especially with large projects. This is a significant move forward and will accelerate Revit as the BIM platform of choice.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

This blog is devoted to developers working with Revit and is written by Jeremy Tammik from the Autodesk DevTech Team. To be honest this is all beyond me! But if you are into pushing the Revit API an SDK its well worth a visit.

Friday, September 26, 2008

As high lighted on a number of blogs as well as AUGI; new builds of Revit Architecture 2009 and Structure 2009 are available for download from the following locations. Note that this service pack is different as it now works like the Autocad service pack functionality.

Edit. Just updated my version of Revit Architecture 2009 using the new service pack tool. As highlighted in the readme.pdf, it is crucial that you have access to the Revit Architecture.msi, else things will go wrong!

If you have updated Revit Architecture using the previous download from the web and you left it in its original download folder located C:\Program Files\Revit Architecture 2009\Download, you should be fine. Although you may still have to browse to the msi manually, I certainly had to; the msi can be found in the following folder.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

I showed the image below on a blog post from last year and back then somebody did question how I put it together. I've updated the model for RAC 2009 as I was keen to see how it would render, so this post is really a follow on from the initial question.

Background

The example is actually a proof of concept. I was at an Autodesk Tech Camp event in Europe last year, when somebody from one of Autodesk distribution companies showed me an example of a project in Denmark called the Light*house. They asked me whether I thought it was possible in Revit? Always up for a challenge and more than happy to share my ideas, I opened up my laptop and within an hour I'd come up with this. The panels are not parametric, although if I'd spent more time, I'm sure I could have made them as such.

How they where created

I started with a generic family, which included an extrusion and a void extrusion to get the initial shape of the curtain wall panel. I made sure that the family was built around a series of reference planes based on the end size of the resulting panel.

The resulting generic family was then loaded into a curtain wall panel family. I then locked and aligned the generic family to the curtain wall panel families reference planes.

I also added a double horizontal control which allows me to flip the panels where required within the curtain system.

Next I started a new project and created a curtain wall system. I then modified the system to the exact sizes of the previously created panel.

I then loaded in my custom curtain wall panel and swapped out the default glass panel for my panel. By default all the panel will be in the same direction on plan. So to get the flowing stepping "in and out" that the facade required, I just flipped every other panel, as per the image below.

As the curtain wall system only spanned between two levels, I copied the system already created up to the second level. I then adjusted the panels to meet the requirements of the pattern at the second level. Once completed the two systems where copied up to complete the image below, it was as simple as that!

Friday, September 19, 2008

I spend a far amount of time travelling each week from where I live in the UK to London. I travel mostly by train as it gives me time to do "stuff" as well as experiment with Revit on my laptop. I often get an idea which I want to try and then it turns into mini design study with many options! Most of them are a load of rubbish to be honest, but it does give me to chance to push Revit to see what can be achieved. Although Revit doesn't provide you with organic tools that products such as 3dsmax, Maya, Rhino and Alias Studio offer, you can still create some interesting forms.

So using the same method described in my previous post, nesting generic families into a cw family, I created these. You will see a common theme as well as how each one was pushed on to create even more complex patterns.

This is the cw panel family, which consisted of swept blends.

This version again consists of swept blends, but in a heliacal form.

This is the swept blend, driven vertically.

Most of these are a bit out there! But it was fun creating them, I hope they inspire.

The power of curtain walls

I personally find curtain wall systems one of Revit's more powerful features, although it does have some limitations and creating this sort of panel type is not easy. So in a vane attempt to copy what Craig and Dave had achieved, I put my thinking cap on to come up with my interpretation on what they had created. My resulting solution is not as organic as theirs, but it does show what can be achieved with a bit of lateral thinking. This is my answer to the problem...

So how did I create this you may ask? Well, often with this type of panel I find is easier to create it as a generic model family and then nest it into a curtain wall panel family and then load this into a curtain wall system. So I started with a generic model family and setup some additional work planes. Next I created a revolve form, created at the centre of the panel.

Next I added four extrusions to fill in the four corners of the panel and then used the join geometry tool to join these elements to the previously created revolve.

The next stage was to create a void extrusion which would cut the panel to form part of the twist shape you see in the rendered views. The initial shape was sketched out completely using symbolic lines.

This gave me this result, but this only formed the first part of the panel.

I next duplicated the above family and altered the revolved so that it bulged inwards and then altered the void cuts to so that they would complete the figure "8" void you can see in the images.

The resulting two generic families where then loaded into a curtain wall panel family and aligned and locked to the reference planes within the curtain wall panel family. This is especially important as this is where things can go "pear shaped"! This was the panel completed.

All I needed to do next, was to load it into a project, draw a curtain wall and setup the grid parameters of the CW to match the size defined in the panel and then make sure that this new CW system used my new panel type.

I'm sure there are other ways to create this, however, I hope you find this "enlighting" and it helps you understand that these type of forms can be created within Revit utilizing its current tool set. All I need to do now is work out how to drive the actual curtain wall panel shape using parameters! ;-)

Friday, September 05, 2008

Harlan Brumm is the Global Technical Lead for Revit with Product Support. I've been told that this site will be focusing on all the Revit Products and working to help customers prevent and solve BIM issues.

Today Autodesk announced details of the 2012 AEC portfolio and once again this is my yearly roundup / review of the Autodesk Revit Architect...

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